In the Land of the Mammoth Eaters
[no-caption] Sarah Gilman In the oaken hills of central Texas between Austin and Waco, a spring rises along a tangled fence line, watercress waving downstream. Water comes up…
Tag: Archaeology
It’s Official: Neanderthals Created Art
Neanderthal art. P. Saura This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. What makes us human? A lot of people would argue it…
Archaeology’s Search for History Hidden in Ice
When Ötzi the Iceman, the most complete Neolithic mummy ever found, melted out of the Tyrolean Alps in 1991, the field of “ice patch archaeology” was born. In…
How a Eurasian Steppe Empire Coped With Decades of Drought
[no-caption] Tuul & Bruno Morandi /Getty Images The bitterly cold, dry air of the Central Asian steppe is a boon to researchers who study the region. The frigid…
Meet Archaeology’s Beer Can Man
These are just a few dozen of the thousands of old beer cans that archaeologist David Maxwell has collected over the years. Nicola Jones David Maxwell doesn’t remember…
What the Archaeology of Night Reveals
[no-caption] Culture Exclusive/Lost Horizon Images/Getty Images As recently as a few decades ago in the Western world, stars dazzled humans with their brightness and the Milky Way could…
Destruction at the ancient site of Mari in Syria
The ancient city was one of the first archaeological sites to be occupied by Islamic State. Now new photos are revealing the fate of this important site as…
Destruction at the ancient site of Mari in Syria
The ancient city was one of the first archaeological sites to be occupied by Islamic State. Now new photos are revealing the fate of this important site as…
Ten Skeletons Bury a Right-Wing Talking Point
Anglo-Saxon mythologies and culture continue to enchant many who live in the U.K. Andrew Parsons/Getty Images This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republ…
What Did Ancient Romans Do Without Toilet Paper?
We’ve all been caught unawares by our digestive tract at one time or another. It happened to the Nash family several months ago. We were nearing the end…
Do Clothes Make a Messiah?
[no-caption] Livioandronico2013/Wikimedia Commons This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. Over the past few decades, the…
How Chinese Immigrants Built—and Lost—a Shellfish Industry
Abalone, which were once abundant in the coastal waters of California, are now primarily cultivated on farms. Universal Images Group/Getty Images At a sleepy outpost in the Sierra…
Secrets of a Brothel Privy
For Jade Luiz, a graduate student in archaeology at Boston University, historical archaeology is all about detective work. Through piecing together historical documents and archaeological finds from t…
Speaking Of Jinn…
I recently participated in a podcast about jinn, material culture and modernity and globalization on the Archaeological Fantasies podcast. Here’s their episode notes: Magical Jinn and where …
Why This Paleolithic Burial Site Is So Strange (and So Important)
Ivory beads and ochre—affixed to the pelvic bones of a child—likely decorated the burial clothing of this 10-year-old interred at Sunghir some 34,000 years ago. E. Trinkaus/Trinkaus and…
Rejecting the Solutrean hypothesis: the first peoples in the Americas were not from Europe
A recent Canadian documentary promoted a fringe idea in American archaeology that’s both scientifically wrong and racist Last month’s release of The Ice Bridge, an episode in the…
Rejecting the Solutrean hypothesis: the first peoples in the Americas were not from Europe
A recent Canadian documentary promoted a fringe idea in American archaeology that’s both scientifically wrong and racist Last month’s release of The Ice Bridge, an episode in the…
Friends, Romans, naked wolf-men … why an ancient festival is still controversial
The annual Lupercalia festival turned society upside down – and the location of its starting point is still hotly debated Scenes from films like Gladiator and series such…
Friends, Romans, naked wolf-men … why an ancient festival is still controversial
The annual Lupercalia festival turned society upside down – and the location of its starting point is still hotly debated Scenes from films like Gladiator and series such…
Transcontinental Travel—2,000 Years Ago
Two thousand years ago, a sophisticated people lived in the rolling hills of the greater Mississippi River drainage in North America. Most of their sites are concentrated in…
How archaeologists discovered an ancient Assyrian city – and lost it again
Turkey’s Ilisu dam will flood hundreds of ancient sites, including the city of Tušhan, but there is now a rich record of what will be lost It’s a…
How archaeologists discovered an ancient Assyrian city – and lost it again
Turkey’s Ilisu dam will flood hundreds of ancient sites, including the city of Tušhan, but there is now a rich record of what will be lost It’s a…
Nerf Herding
By AP Joseph Hey there! A month into 2018, and there’s already plenty of geek action going on (gaction?) What can you expect from this column, you ask,…
Can the Hunt for Skeletons Help Heal a Nation’s Wounds?
[no-caption] David Williams/SAPIENS The abandoned Nicosia airport in Cyprus is a strange place for an anthropology lab. But there I was—at the end of a humid spring day…